Earlier this summer, before Miley Cyrus became the most offensive white person ever to wield a foam hand and darting tongue, a young woman named Aaryn Gries spewed racist and homophobic bile on a trashy staple of modern life and television called Big Brother. Last night that woman was evicted by her competitors and confronted by audience jeers and a real, live Asian person whose primary function is not to cook rice or do nails, the host of Big Brother Julie Chen. Naturally, Gries' head exploded.

Earlier this week, we ran a post on 12-year-old Lillian Powers, a kid who had the audacity to do something productive over her summer break: She made a series of amazing 6-second short films via Vine. She screamed in public spaces (her "random shoutout" feature), she licked her cat, she deconstructed the modern practice of selfie-taking. From the hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of Facebook shares and Twitter mentions our post This 12-Year-Old Is a Vine Genius received, it was clear that many people had agreed with what probably seemed like a hyperbolic headline.

Weekend crafting, sugar consuming, napkin note-taking, normal director of seizure warnings David Lynch has some advice for aspiring filmmakers. In a short clip uploaded to Quark Henares' Instagram, Lynch dispenses wisdom from below a cliff of electrified hair. He gives three pieces of advice: "Be true to yourself," "don't take no for an answer," and then whoop! "start your Transcendental meditation." Just speaking to the mundane, pedestrian, workaday everyman.

Exploiting her granddaughter and making Kanye West endure an hour of awkward questions wasn't enough to save Kris Jenner's talk show, which has been canceled, reports Radar. A rare miss for that iron-clad Kardashian brand.

Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity won raves after its Venice Film Festival premiere last night. Be excited. Be very excited. In space, no one can hear you get excited. Etc.

It's gonna take a lot for a headline to come along today that's more incendiary than "Miley Cyrus and Kanye West Reportedly Team for 'Black Skinhead' Remix," but hey, it's still early.

Nobody on Vine amuses me more consistently than a 12-year-old girl from Birmingham, Michigan, who goes by the name Lillian Powers. She started posting her absurd, awkward-funny 6-second videos on June 11. In the time since, she has posted 95. I assume this is something of a summer-vacation project. It's been time well spent.

Miley Cyrus' jaw-dropping twerk-a-thon at this year's MTV Video Music A-twerks was a twerktacular twerkfest that set off a 24/7 twerk cycle. The news loves twerking, the news is confused by twerking, some people on the news won't twerk, some people say they will but don't.

In the past, there's been a certain ceremony to the public sexual awakening of pop divas.

Tina Turner is ripening into an excellent eccentric old lady.

A favorite of music fans, critics, and audience-reaction cams alike, Taylor Swift is the belle of any awards-show ball. She shows up, she responds to what's happening onstage with the finesse, subtlety, and attention-hunger of a mime. Even if she isn't performing on any given night, she's still performing. Case in point happened during last night's VMAs when Swift danced like everybody was watching, loved the awards-show medium like she'll never be hurt (again...by Kanye), sang like everyone could hear her even though she wasn't miked, and lived like Brooklyn is heaven on earth.

Here are two ways to look at director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett's new intensely bloody home-invasion horror flick You're Next:

The most surprising aspect of Forbes' list of the world's highest paid models is that the names here don't make more money. Considering that DJ Pauly D earned $13 million within the very same time frame, the $7.2 million second-highest-grossing figure Miranda Kerr brought in seems low. Also, no Kate Upton.

Nirvana, the "alternative" rockers who recently reunited to shoot a very special homecoming video message for Virginia Tech's "Hoagies," first signed to Sub Pop Records in 1989. Fortunately, the Pacific Northwest label has kept the original paperwork around all these years and published that initial contract to Tumblr yesterday, which we've reposted below:

For the second summer in a row, '80s relic David Hasselhoff has starred in a deliberately cheesy advertisement for Cumberland Farms' Farmhouse Blend iced coffee. Last summer, the kitsch-nostalgia campaign was so wildly successful that according to the Boston Globe, the 600-plus in-store cardboard cutouts and pole signs of the Hoff were all stolen, later making social-media cameos at weddings, concerts, and even in a canoe.

Spike Lee, a very accomplished New York film director and NYU professor, has spent a substantial part of this summer promoting a Kickstarter campaign he'd launched to crowdsource a $1,250,000 budget for his vaguely defined next movie. (On Friday, his $1.25-million goal was met.) One of the ways he'd drummed up publicity for the project was by releasing the academic list of essential movies he considers "the greatest films ever made," a slugsheet of cinematic titles he'd routinely hand out on the first day of class, which we published here.

What made Shakespeare such an unprecedented literary genius? Mostly our ignorance of literary precedent, the Boston Globe reports.

Hey, we know it's the last season of Breaking Bad and all, still widely regarded the most satisfying show on television. But when your cable connection seems to be down right before a new episode is supposed to air on AMC, here is a list of semi-reasonable actions you may take to confront the situation and/or vent your personal frustration:

After today's Good Morning America premiere of her music video for "Applause," the real hero of cosplay, Lady Gaga, told George Stephanopoulos, "I really felt like I could be myself in this video." In it, she plays over half a dozen characters including a jester, an apparent emulation of Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, and a swan with a Gaga head.

"Normalcy is not interesting," said Lindsay Lohan toward the end of her sit-down with Oprah Winfrey on Oprah's Next Chapter, which aired last night. The actress sounded not just granted with serenity, but self-awareness — her interview was slow and bland. It was seasoned with information that was already evident to anyone paying attention to the hopeful former-troubled-star: Lohan is an addict whose poison is alcohol, she finds going to court humiliating, and she is eager to work/maintain her sobriety that's a result of her recent three-month trip to rehab (with one month spent at Betty Ford and the other two at Cliffside Malibu).